On Feb 25, 2015 8:25 PM, "jd1008" <jd1008@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I found
> https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/
> and
> https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/
> and
> http://draconux.free.fr/os_dev/linux0.01.html
>
> But I cannot find any first CD iso releases.

People have mentioned having CDs and floppies, but no links so far, so...

Here's some information about running Slackware 1.01 in a virtual machine, complete with floppy image links:
http://blog.nielshorn.net/2009/06/older-slackware-versions-vi/

The earliest CD image I could find is for Slackware 3.2:
http://slackware.cs.utah.edu/pub/slackware/slackware-3.2-iso/

From the Red Hat/Fedora side, the earliest floppy image I could find is from Red Hat Linux 4.2:
http://archive.download.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/4.2/en/os/i386/images/boot.img

There's lots of partial content and the root of that URL for earlier releases, but AFAICT RH didn't make floppy images publicly downloadable before then; the directories where they would be seem to be all empty.

The earliest CD images available are for 6.2:
http://archive.download.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/6.2/en/iso/

I guess I'm a real youngster compared to everyone else, because I didn't join the party till a little bit later, when a friend of my dad's (I was really a youngster at the time!) handed me a copy of Red Hat Linux 7 for Dummies complete with CDs in the back cover. (Thankfully he had good choice in friends, had he instead handed me a copy of the also recently released Windows 2000 things might have ended up much differently. :-)

My poor old Gateway couldn't run Windows 98 without blue screening every 5 minutes, but damn if it didn't run that thing flawlessly. (It even made it to Fedora 2 before it finally gave the ghost!) The included copy of Netscape Navigator 4 left much to be desired, but I quickly discovered early milestones of this Mozilla Suite thing which worked much better, despite all the scary warnings Netscape had plastered all over Mozilla.org at the time.

-T.C.